“Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa,” Duke tweeted after the news conference.

Fascistic groups make up a pivotal constituency for Trump. Without their support, he might not have become President. He can’t afford to alienate them.

But others who aren’t beholden to the Fascistic Right have taken a stand against its hate-mongering.

On October 30, 2015, the hacker group Anonymous released a prepared statement:

“Ku Klux Klan, We never stopped watching you. We know who you are. We know the dangerous extent to which you will go to cover your asses….

“We will release, to the global public, the identities of up to 1000 klan members, Ghoul Squad affiliates and other close associates of various factions of the Ku Klux Klan.” This included ages, phone numbers, addresses and even credit card numbers.

Anonymous mask

By November 5, Anonymous had released the names of about 1,000 alleged KKK members or sympathizers via a Twitter data dump.

Among those names released by Anonymous:

U.S. Senator Thom Tillis (R-N.C.);

U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX.);

U.S. Senator Dan Coats (R-IN.)

U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA.);

Mayor Madeline Rogero, Knoxville, TN.;

Mayor Jim Gray, Lexington, KY.;

Mayor Paul D. Fraim, Norfolk, VA.;

Mayor Kent Guinn, Ocala, FL.; and

Mayor Tom Henry, Fort Wayne, IN.

All of these officials denied any affiliation with the Klan.

“I got the information from several KKK websites when I [hacked] them and was able to dump their database,” Amped Attacks, who released the information, stated online.

This mass leak was easily the worst assault on the KKK since the Justice Department waged an all-out attack on the Klan during the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.

The reason: The murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi—Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney—-on June 21, 1964.

Poster for missing civil rights workers

Johnson ordered the FBI to find the missing activists. After their bodies were found buried near a dam, Johnson gave FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover a direct order: “I want you to have the same kind of intelligence [on the KKK] that you have on the communists.”

So the FBI launched a counterintelligence program—in Bureau-speak, a COINTELPRO—against the Ku Klux Klan.

Klansmen had shot, lynched and bombed their way across the Deep South, especially in Alabama and Mississippi. Many Southern sheriffs and police chiefs were Klan sympathizers, if not outright members and accomplices.

Ku Klux Klansmen in a meeting

The FBI’s covert action program aimed to “expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize” KKK groups through a wide range of legal and extra-legal methods.

“My father fought the Klan in Massachusetts,” recalled William C. Sullivan, who headed the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division in the 1960s. “I always used to be frightened when I was a kid and I saw the fiery crosses burning in the hillside near our farm.

William C. Sullivan

“When the Klan reached 14,000 in the mid-sixties, I asked to take over the investigation of the Klan. When I left the Bureau in 1971, the Klan was down to a completely disorganized 4,300. It was broken.

“They were dirty, rough fellows. And we went after them with rough, tough methods.”

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